Mashable

LOS ANGELES — Before Michelle Phan became the biggest influencer in beauty and was compared to Oprah Winfrey, she was a starving student at an arts college in Florida. She waited tables at Pacific Rim Sushi in Sarasota, an expensive locale on the southern end of the Tampa Bay Area, which caters to tourists from the city’s beachside resorts.

She figured if she was going to work at a restaurant and “bust her balls for tips,” it was going to be where all the rich people went.

The year was 2007, and the then 19-year-old didn’t mind cleaning tables; if it meant being able to pay the bills, so be it.

It had been a tough year. Phan had managed to raise enough cash from her relatives and mom — more than $10,000 — to attend her first semester at the Ringling College of Art and Design. But by the time the second had started, she came up short. Unable to pay for tuition and having no credit for loans, she was forced to drop out.

Though the period was trying, she felt fortunate about one thing: the community she created online, fans and friends who supported her over the years and endured with her through the struggles. They were part of a digital ecosystem where she could project another persona — one who was confident, charismatic, cool. With the Internet at her fingertips, she began uploading makeup tutorials on YouTube and then her Xanga page, where she was known by her screen name, RiceBunny.

Soon enough, her humble but imaginative iMovie-edited flicks would explode in popularity. Not only would she quit her waitressing job for good, she would become YouTube’s greatest success story, creating multiple businesses in the process and amassing an empire said to be worth half a billion dollars.

Phan changed the history of the Internet, most certainly YouTube and the definition of celebrity, and she would inspire millions along the way. But achieving this feat would be far from easy. Constant reinvention was necessary, the most recent, in 2015, when she bought her beauty brand from a major corporation. It was one of her biggest challenges yet.

She just didn’t know it would all happen so soon.

On a sunny California morning, Phan moseys into ipsy Open Studios, a 10,000-square foot space located in Santa Monica. She is now more than her screen name, RiceBunny, and more than just her YouTube channel, which has gained more than 8.3 million followers and more than a billion views.

Michelle Phan is a business.

In the years since launching her tutorials, she started a lifestyle network called ICON with Endemol Shine Group and a beauty subscription service, ipsy. She partnered with L’Oreal USA to create her own beauty brand, em.

Things have been phenomenal for Phan — for the most part.

“[She] has become a formidable beauty mogul — and she’s headed toward unicorn status,” Forbes wrote in its “30 Under 30” January issue.

“[She’s] changing the marketing playbook for makeup,” Fast Company wrote.

But in 2015, Phan faced some significant roadblocks.

“I call 2015 a year of deconstruction,” she says. “I needed to deconstruct myself, my businesses, and find all of the holes in my empire.” She winces at the word. “I had to find holes and fill them with people who could do it better.”

One of those holes was em, which launched in August 2013. According to insiders formerly at em, the brand wasn’t hitting expectations and was underperforming. Em never made it past its startup phase, sources say. The brand didn’t stand a chance with L’Oreal at the helm, because the company provided little to no resources to help it grow, a former em employee tells Mashable.

WWD reported in 2015 that the brand was losing its audience and perhaps worse, its identity.

“One analyst suggested that the pricing was too high for Phan’s youthful audience,” the article said.

Jean Godfrey-June, beauty director at Goop, has followed Phan’s career for years. To her, Phan is facing a dilemma many content creators have: Create popular products that reflect who they are as brands.

“I think being brilliant and wildly successful in that realm [of YouTube] doesn't guarantee being an overwhelming, right-out-of-the-gates success,” she says. "Em is a great line, but it hasn't yet had the impact on our culture that Michelle herself has had.”

So, Phan retook the brand and assumed full control. Ipsy bought the company from L’Oreal USA last October for an undisclosed amount. The decision, she says, was a no-brainer.

“How can you control the destiny of your career if you have other people putting red tape around you?” Phan says. “So 2015 was the year where I destroyed my ego. Now, 2016 is the year of construction."

Her new question: “How can we make beauty products better?” Now, Phan aims to solve specific problems in niche markets.

She cites Asian eyebrows as an example, which tend to be thinner than those of other ethnicities. “What if someone created some sort of eyebrow pencil that was revolutionary and that was made specifically to help eyebrows look more realistic?”

Or, perhaps, an easy remedy for curly-haired women who want to give straight styles a try. “Maybe there’s a simple gel they could use to instantly help with that,” she poses.

Phan is currently working with calligraphy artists and brushmakers to create the most effective tool for eyeliner, the perfect cat eye in one stroke.

“I want to focus on one problem at a time,” she says.

“If she can cater to her audience and be really nimble and responsive to what her fans want, em will stand out,” says Ying Chu, executive beauty director at Glamour. “Very few brands have that close-knit trust with their customers.” She's talking about Phan’s biggest advantage: her trust and influence with fans.

Simultaneously, Phan must juggle her other ventures, like the open studios she created with ipsy. The space offers state-of-the-art equipment, props, cameras and lighting for beauty vloggers to create their own videos. It rivals that of YouTube’s own studios, which have equipment for its community members, though the Google-run operation is a lot slicker. Ipsy Studios, by contrast, is no frills.

Ipsy also offers a monthly beauty subscription service that goes head-to-head with Birchbox. Birchbox launched in 2010 and has robust funding. It has since been estimated to pull in around $170 million a year, according to Fast Company.

Phan’s Ipsy, in comparison, was cofounded four years ago and recently took an investment of $100 million.

The company ships 1.5 million “Glam Bags” to subscribers who pay $10 a month to try new products, such as Smashbox mascara and eMite tweezers. The bags include em products occasionally, but have pulled back lately given em's rebranding.

The venture has been successful for Phan. Ipsy now boasts more than 140 employees, some of which are other beauty vloggers hired to create a couple of videos a month promoting the business.

But onto the next one. Today Phan is envisioning her next venture: a comic book.

Art -- her first true passion -- connects to her roots and keeps her inspired.

In California, the 28-year-old wanders into her office. She sports a khaki-colored baseball cap styled backwards, an oversized olive aviator jacket, Nike sneakers with pink socks, an enormous backpack that engulfs her petite frame, and sketch gloves.

“You think these are stylish?” she asks, inquisitively. “It’s really geeky, actually. I was drawing all morning.”

She’s talking about her sketches for HELIOS: FEMINA, the graphic novel she’s been working on since she was 11. The comic book will finally debut in March after almost two decades. The concept was born out of her childhood imagination — during a time when she often locked herself in her room imagining another dimension.

The entire saga is a mix between science-fiction and fantasy. It revolves around a girl named Rhea, who lives in future Earth. She has a guide who shows her true calling and helps her realize her gifts.

“The foundation is build on female empowerment,” she says. “Helios is the personification of the sun, and Femina is ‘feminine’ in Latin. It’s the feminine sun.”

She shows off her sketches with childlike wonder, her eyes widening, her cheeks sanguine.

“What do you think?”

When she was younger, art was one of the only constants in Phan’s ever-changing world. Her family may have broken up — her dad abandoned them when she was six years old — and food sometimes ran scarce after government food stamps, but art always remained.

“One day, you have a father who’s always around,” she says of her past. “And then the next day, he’s gone. I was too young to comprehend that. I actually thought he was going to come back.”

Phan’s parents emigrated from war-torn Vietnam to pursue the American Dream. Her mom had her first child at 19. Both moved to a foreign country to provide their three children with better lives. But love couldn’t pay the bills, and it certainly couldn’t stop Phan’s dad from gambling away the family’s resources.

After Phan’s dad left, she, her mother and her siblings relocated from diverse, metropolitan Oakland to the very homogeneous suburbs of Florida. There, a new man would enter her life: her stepdad.

“My stepdad kind of distracted us from missing our dad,” she recalls. But he soon became overbearing, controlling every aspect of their lives, from the arrangement of their rooms to having friends over (no guests allowed, ever).

“I always had that yearning, that hunger, to one day be independent and be my own person and build my own world,” she says. “The most fulfilling thing is to live a life where you have freedom.”

That meant a life where she could not only be her own person, but take her family with her.

“I told my mom distinctly, ‘When I’m 25, I’m going to retire you,’” she recalls. “Whenever I say something, I kill myself so I do it. It’s crazy. I have to keep that promise or else I don’t have a purpose. And my purpose was to retire my mom as fast as I could.”

To do so meant functioning on four hours of sleep, always going. She would wait tables all hours of the day then run home to film a video, make quick edits and upload it to YouTube.

Her mom, who spent her days working, was her impetus. She was always on her mind. Phan’s mom found work as a nail technician, as is common within the Vietnamese American community. But it always unsettled Phan to witness her mom breathing and handling chemicals.

“It got so bad that her breathing became affected,” Phan recalls.

So L’Oreal’s offer for a collaborative makeup line changed her and her family’s lives. Phan could fulfill her promise. “My mom didn’t have to work anymore."

Phan phoned with the news when her mother was finishing a client's pedicure.

“What are you doing, Mom?” Phan asked.

“Why? What’s up?” her mom replied.

“Mommy!” Phan said in Vietnamese. “You don’t have to work any more after today.”

Tears began streaming down her face, and she could hear the sniffles on the other side of the line.

“Oh my gosh, I love you, Mom.”

The 28-year old says she worked hard in her career so that she could support others. Today, she employs over 140 people.

David Walter Banks

Years later, after Phan had settled in Los Angeles, she traveled back to Florida. Her alma mater, the Ringling College of Arts and Design, was giving her an honorary doctorate degree. The prize was a huge honor, yes, but its significance meant much more to someone else.

“See, Mom? I’m a doctor now,” she said.

It was validation to an Asian immigrant mother whose sole American Dream was not only to provide for her offspring, but see them thrive. All those years of heartache, of missed opportunity, of regret, all weighing on her shoulders seemed to finally lift away, vanishing into the brackish air.

That night, Phan, with her entire family in tow, went out to celebrate the honor. In the sleepy town where time moves slowly, there was still only one nice place to go for dinner: Pacific Rim Sushi.

Phan stands in front of a wall at ipsy Studios in Santa Monica, one of the many businesses she now owns.

David Walter Banks

Her face, worn out by the day, glowed at the sight of her family together — the Atlantic Ocean mist kissed their cheeks underneath the bright moonlight. It was an emotional day, one that brought back memories, one that was triumphant. One, strangely, that seemed to have been written methodically by the universe. It was as if destiny led her back to where it all began, whispering in her ear that everything is okay, everything was alright, everything would be more than fine.

She left a large tip that night — this time as a patron — paying it forward, as if no time had passed at all.